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AS JUSTIN Trudeau battles a scandal which threatens to bring down his government, opposition leader Jagmeet Singh haas promised to “ramp up the pressure” on the embattled Canadian prime minister.

Mr Singh, leader of the New Democratic Party, said he “danced the night away” after winning a seat in Canada’s House of Commons in a by-election yesterday allowing him to finally go toe-to-toe with Mr Trudeau. Canada’s Prime Minister is facing intense pressure to reveal exactly what he knows about whether officials from his office inappropriately pressured a former cabinet minister to interfere with a prosecution on construction giant SNC-Lavalin. Jody Wilson-Raybould, Canada’s former justice secretary and attorney general, has said she hopes to “tell her truth” when she appears before the Commons’ justice committee later today amid accusations ‘a line was clearly crossed’.

Ms Wilson-Raybould quit the Cabinet last month and is consulting lawyers as to what she can say on the scandal.

Last week, Canada’s top civil servant Michael Wernick denied any wrongdoing when he testified to the justice committee but admitted Ms Wilson-Raybould would likely “express concern” about a series of meetings on SNC-Lavalin when she speaks.

Mr Singh, head of Canada’s third biggest party, said his by-election victory “allows me to ramp up the pressure on Mr Trudeau and on the Liberal government”.

He added: “It allows me to really put into focus the question, ‘Is this Liberal government more interest in helping their well-connected, powerful friends like SNC-Lavalin?’”.

The 40-year-old has made waves in Canadian politics as the first person of a minority ethnic group to become leader of a major party.

Mr Singh was chosen to replace Tom Mulcair in October last year as the former NDP leader lost a leadership review.

He finally won a Commons seat by seizing Vancouver constituency Burnaby South with 39 percent of the vote this week.

The win means he can now face Mr Trudeau in parliament directly, joining opposition Conservative calls for a public inquiry into the SNC-Lavalin affair.

Mr Trudeau has dismissed a full-scale investigation, saying the Ethics Commissioner’s examination into events is enough to answer Canadians’ questions.

Mr Singh will take up his Commons seat on March 18 and has promised to seize the limited opportunity to speak before Canada’s parliament rises in June ahead of elections in October.

Mr Mulcair’s former principal secretary, Karl Belanger, said Mr Singh “has an opportunity to be seen and heard on the same stage as the other main party leaders”.

He added there is no time to waste for Mr Singh to put pressure on Mr Trudeau with the autumn elections just around the political corner.

Mr Mulcair added: “It will be up to him to perform and do well and connect with Canadians with a narrative that speaks to their priorities.”

Don't really know anything about Singh except that if he leads the New Democratic Party (NDP) he is almost certainly liberal. This means that it looks like all sides are gunning for Trudeau. They must smell blood in the water.

I don't think the NDP's will win federally. They crap up every province in which they win leadership (the latest being mine), but they will work alongside the official opposition to get the current leader out. If the Conservatives win this fall, Singh will be joining forces with the likely opposition Liberals to cause trouble for them. That is part of their MO.

Securely anchored to the Rock amid every storm of trial, testing or tribulation.

OTTAWA – Treasury Board President Jane Philpott has resigned from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's federal cabinet, saying that she has lost confidence in the way the government is handling the ongoing SNC-Lavalin scandal.
In a statement posted to her MP website, Philpott said that the recent events, including the SNC-Lavalin scandal, "have shaken the federal government in recent weeks and after serious reflection, I have concluded that I must resign as a member of cabinet."
Trudeau has been facing calls to resign after former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould testified at the House Justice Committee last week that she faced high-level "veiled threats" and "sustained" political interference in the criminal prosecution of the Quebec construction and engineering company.

A Canadian cabinet minister, who had quit in protest over the government’s handling of a corruption scandal, said she and others had more to say about the matter, indicating more pain to come for embattled Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Trudeau has been on the defensive since Feb. 7 over allegations that top officials working for him leaned on former Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould last year to ensure that construction company SNC-Lavalin Group Inc avoided a corruption trial.

“There’s much more to the story that should be told,” former Treasury Board President Jane Philpott told Macleans’ magazine in an interview released on Thursday.

“I believe we actually owe it to Canadians as politicians to ensure that they have the truth,” she said. Philpott added that she and Wilson-Raybould had more to say but did not elaborate. Philpott, a close political ally of Wilson-Raybould, quit on March 4.

Trudeau, who has denied any political interference to protect SNC-Lavalin from a bribery trial, indicated he felt Canadians had already heard enough.

Wilson-Raybould had the chance to “share completely” her thoughts during almost four hours of testimony to the House of Commons justice committee last month, he told reporters in Mississauga, Ontario when asked about Philpott’s remarks.

The crisis may threaten Trudeau’s reelection chances in the upcoming October vote. Polls show the center-left Liberals, who as recently as January looked certain to win, could lose to the official opposition Conservatives.

As well as the two ministers, the affair has claimed Trudeau’s closest political aide and the head of the federal bureaucracy. A Liberal legislator who backed Wilson-Raybould quit on Wednesday to sit as an independent.

Trudeau suffered further potential embarrassment on Thursday when SNC-Lavalin Chief Executive Neil Bruce denied he had told government officials that 9,000 jobs could be at risk if the firm was found guilty of offering bribes to Libyan officials.

Trudeau has often referred to the 9,000 potential job losses as a reason for helping the company, which wanted to take advantage of new legislation to pay a large fine rather than be prosecuted.

“Until we are able to put this behind us, it’s pretty difficult to grow our Canadian workforce,” Bruce told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

Asked whether he had specified the number of jobs that could be at risk, he replied: “No, we never gave a number.”

A court conviction would bar SNC-Lavalin from bidding on federal government contracts for 10 years.

Bruce said if the company’s share price continued to suffer, it might become a takeover target.

SNC-Lavalin’s headquarters are in the populous province of Quebec, where the Liberals say they need to pick up more seats in the October election to retain a majority government.

Trudeau has dismissed calls for a public inquiry, noting the House of Commons justice committee was probing the matter. That committee, dominated by Liberal legislators, shut down its inquiry on Tuesday, saying no more action was needed.

In protest, the Conservatives forced the House to sit through the night from Wednesday into Thursday casting votes on hundreds of confidence motions.

FWICT, this looks like Trudeau and friends tried to quash an investigation into one of his buddies/contributors. So the sort of thing that the left fantasizes about Trump doing, Trudeau appears to have actually done -- and in an amazingly ham-fisted manner.

I'm always still in trouble again

"You're by far the worst poster on TWeb" and "TWeb's biggest liar" -- starlight (the guy who says Stalin was a right-winger)

Jody Wilson-Raybould submitted a recorded conversation of the phone call with former Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick in a 44-page document on the SNC-Lavalin affair that was released to the public Friday afternoon.

Wilson-Raybould has asserted that Wernick, who is the country’s top civil servant, made “veiled threats” against her on the SNC-Lavalin affair, but Wernick has denied making threats to her during his second appearance at the justice committee earlier this month.

Wernick came under fire from opposition parties who said he is overly partisan and have called on him to resign.

He then announced last week that he will retire early and leave the post by April 19.

In the December 2018 phone call, Wilson-Raybould warns Wernick repeatedly about the perception of political interference if she overrode the federal prosecutor to offer SNC-Lavalin a deal to avoid a criminal trial.

It corroborates virtually all details of Wilson-Raybould’s four-hour testimony on the SNC-Lavalin affair on Feb. 27, 2019.

Here’s the transcript of the nearly 18-minute conversation between Wernick and Wilson-Raybould.

A former cabinet member at the heart of a crisis that could cost Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau his job on Friday released documents to back up her case that she had been pressured to help a large corporation avoid a corruption trial.

Trudeau has been on the defensive since Feb. 7 over allegations that officials inappropriately leaned on former Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould last year to ensure construction company SNC-Lavalin Group Inc escaped a trial by paying a fine instead.

The crisis may well threaten Trudeau’s reelection chances in a vote this October. Polls show his center-left Liberals, who as recently as January looked certain to win, could lose to the official opposition Conservatives.

Wilson-Raybould made public around 40 pages of documents revealing more details of what she said were attempts by officials to force her change her mind even after she insisted they desist.

Wilson-Raybould, who was demoted to veterans affairs minister in January and resigned the following month, first made the allegations in almost four hours of testimony to the House of Commons justice committee last month.

Trudeau says officials were trying to make Wilson-Raybould understand that thousands of jobs would be at risk if SNC-Lavalin were found guilty of bribing Libyan officials. Trudeau insists he and his team did nothing wrong.

The affair has so far cost Trudeau two high-profile female cabinet ministers, his closest personal aide and the head of the federal bureaucracy, Michael Wernick.

Wilson-Raybould included a recording of a phone call with Wernick last December in which he told her he was worried about “a collision” between her and Trudeau “because he is pretty firm about this.”

Wilson-Raybould, who stressed she thought the call was inappropriate, told Wernick she was waiting “for the other shoe to drop” because she was under no illusion about how Trudeau “gets things that he wants.”

Opposition legislators said the documents reinforced their demand for a public inquiry into the matter, something Trudeau says is not necessary.

“She is actually trying to speak truth to power, trying to say, ‘You can’t do this,’ ... and it keeps happening,” New Democratic Party parliamentarian Nathan Cullen told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

Trudeau’s office was not immediately available for comment.

The crisis is opening rifts inside the Liberal Party and some legislators want Wilson-Raybould to be kicked out of the parliamentary caucus, a move Trudeau has so far resisted.

Trudeau says officials were trying to make Wilson-Raybould understand that thousands of jobs would be at risk if SNC-Lavalin were found guilty of bribing Libyan officials. Trudeau insists he and his team did nothing wrong.

FWIU, the company was threatening to move their HQ to London if the investigation continued. But aren't they in effect a construction company? And with construction companies you do the work on site. IOW, they can't, say, build a bridge in London and then ship it across the Atlantic for it to be installed somewhere in Canuckistan. They would still have to do the work in Canuckistan and hire Canuckistanis to do it.

So aside from the fact that Trudeau and his cronies seem fine with being blackmailed into letting a corporation get off scot free for flagrantly violate the law, but the threat seems rather impotent as well.

I'm always still in trouble again

"You're by far the worst poster on TWeb" and "TWeb's biggest liar" -- starlight (the guy who says Stalin was a right-winger)

MONTREAL -- A Quebec judge has ruled there is enough evidence to send SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. to trial on charges of fraud and corruption, surprising few and prompting a further tumble in the beleaguered firm's share price.

"Given the threshold to be met by the prosecution at the stage of the preliminary inquiry, this outcome was expected," said SNC-Lavalin chief executive Neil Bruce in a statement.

The company has previously pleaded not guilty and Bruce said that "we will vigorously defend ourselves to get the right outcome and be acquitted."

The Montreal-based engineering and construction giant is accused of paying $47.7 million in bribes to public officials in Libya between 2001 and 2011. The company, its construction division and a subsidiary also face one charge each of fraud and corruption for allegedly defrauding various Libyan organizations of $129.8 million.

The decision is the latest step in criminal proceedings that began last fall after SNC-Lavalin failed to secure a deferred prosecution agreement, a kind of plea deal that would have seen the firm agree to pay a fine rather than face prosecution.

Hopefully Trudeau will end up in court with them.

Securely anchored to the Rock amid every storm of trial, testing or tribulation.

Mario Dion concluded that Trudeau’s attempts to influence Wilson-Raybould on the matter contravened section 9 of the act, which prohibits public office holders from using their position to try to influence a decision that would improperly further the private interests of a third party.

He said there’s little doubt that SNC-Lavalin’s financial interests would have been furthered had Trudeau succeeded in convincing Wilson-Raybould to overturn a decision by the director of public prosecutions, who had refused to invite the Montreal engineering giant to negotiate a remediation agreement in order to avoid a criminal prosecution on fraud charges related to contracts in Libya.

“The prime minister, directly and through his senior officials, used various means to exert influence over Ms. Wilson-Raybould,” Dion wrote.

“The authority of the prime minister and his office was used to circumvent, undermine and ultimately attempt to discredit the decision of the director of public prosecutions as well as the authority of Ms. Wilson-Raybould as the Crown’s chief law officer.”

Dion said Trudeau also improperly pushed Wilson-Raybould to consider partisan political interests in the matter, contrary to constitutional principles on prosecutorial independence and the rule of law.